Who Turned Out the Lights?

It is rare for the New York City Fire Department to run out of
units. We have 454 pieces of apparatus staffed full time: 203 engines,
143 ladders, 49 battalion chiefs, 9 divisions, and 50 assorted
special units. Yet, on August 14, 2003, when the most widespread
blackout in the country's history hit the Northeast, dispatchers in
Brooklyn had more alarms than Brooklyn had units. The other four
boroughs had just barely enough to hold their own.

Every summer for the last few years, the local electric utility
warned the city to conserve or face rolling blackouts. However, the
summer of 2003 was not a brutal summer. In fact, the season started
late as a low-pressure trough sat stationary on the east coast for
much of June. It came as a shock to me, as it did to millions of
other people, when "the big one" hit.

New York City is home to some 7 million people. During the week that
number swells as out-of-towners from upstate, New Jersey, Connecticut,
and Long Island come here to work. Moving all of those people
around takes a lot of power. They depend on electricity to run the
Port Authority Trans-Hudson, Metro-North, and Long Island commuter
railroads, and the New York City subway.

Many buildings in the city have elevators. From the typical five or
6-story housing project to the (now) tallest building in the city,
Empire State Building, they are a necessity for daily life. We take
for granted these modern conveniences. But, when power fails, it
leaves hundreds of thousands of people stranded and realizing just
how dependant they are on electricity.

Thursday, 1600 hours. The workday nears its end and rush hour begins.
The throngs head for the elevators and trains to begin their ride
home. At roughly 1610 hours, a cascade failure of the power grid
caused the City to grind to a halt. Within minutes, every central
office received calls for stuck elevators and stalled trains.

As the day wore on, people again were reminded how dependant they
are on electricity as their cordless and electrically powered phones
did not function. Cell phones worked for a short time, but they soon
stopped working as the power drain on the backup batteries in the
cell towers exceeded their design specifications.

Fortunately, for New Yorkers, our street fire alarm box network
remained 100% in service. All boxes receive their power from the
central office by department owned wires. Our offices are totally
self-sufficient and can run indefinitely without outside power. Help
was never farther away than the pull of a handle, or the push of a
button. NYPD 911, on the other hand, had to deal with 3 outages
stemming from equipment failures at the local telephone company
switching office.

As night fell, fires increased. From 1600 hours of the 14th to
midnight of the 15th, there were 60 all-hands or greater alarm fires;
caused mostly by candles. The situation was grave enough that the
department instituted off-duty recall, staffed 33 additional engine
companies and dispatchers from the day tour were held into the night.